Invited Speakers

Alessandro D'Ausilio is Team Leader at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genova. He studied Experimental Psychology and received a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from La Sapienza University of Rome in 2007. He's interested in the motor contribution to speech and action comprehension. He also studies musicians as a model of sensorimotor plasticity and expert social interaction and communication. He has published more than 20 papers in international journals like Current Biology, Brain or Human Brain Mapping.

Maëva Garnier has recently joined the department of Speech and Cognition of the Gipsa-Lab in Grenoble, as a CNRS researcher, after spending several years at the University of New South Wales (Sidney). Her recent work is about on-line adaptation mechanisms in oral communication (e.g. voluntary imitation, recalibration processes in speech production, adaptation of speech in noise). She published her work in several international journals such as Journal of Singing, Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Simon Garrod is Professor of Cognitive Psychology, at the University of Glasgow. Until 1999 he was Deputy Director of the ESRC Human Communication Research Centre at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Garrod's research is on various aspects of language processing. These include discourse processing, dialogue and the semantics of spatial prepositions.

Beatrice Szczepek Reed is Lecturer in the Department of Education of the University of York,  United Kingdom. Her main interest is in prosody, natural conversation and cross-cultural communication in the framework of conversational analysis and interactional linguistics. Her research explores language as a resource for social interaction, in particular for the implementation and coordination of actions. She is the author of the monograph Prosodic Orientation in English Conversation and of numerous articles on prosody and talk-in-interaction published in international journals such as Language and Speech or Journal of Pragmatics.